Kelly M. Britt
Kelly M. Britt
Assistant Professor
Kelly M. Britt, Ph.D., R.P.A., is an assistant professor of urban archaeology focusing on community-based historical archaeology of urban spaces. She completed her Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University in 2009, where her research concentrated on how identity and sense of place are seen materially through heritage discourse during processes of change in urban settings. She is currently interested in two areas of research: 1) exploring the intersection of activism and materiality, and 2) heritage management seen both locally and globally. She is currently working with the United Order of Tents Eastern District, #3 the oldest Black women's benevolent society in the United States, whose headquarters in located in a 19th-century mansion in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
Historic preservation work has allowed her to work in a variety of settings, including the federal government, museums, academia, and private cultural resource management firms, in addition to freelance projects and consulting. In her former position as regional archaeologist at FEMA Region II's offices in New York from 2010 to 2017, she served as manager and overseer of archaeological projects under review for Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act for projects in New York, New Jersey, and the territories of Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands. She also served as the Tribal Nation liaison for the Environmental and Historic Preservation Cadre of the Region. In addition, Britt held the position as FEMA Region II's liaison for CultureAID and adviser for Alliance for Response NYC, two volunteer network organizations in the New York City area that assist the arts, cultural, and heritage sectors of the city in preparing for, assisting in, and mitigating after disasters. She has recently taken her work with disasters and heritage management to collaborate with other archaeologists on a global scale and can be seen in recent publications.
Her writing spans across various topics and genres. She has written several successful Network to Freedom designations for Underground Railroad sites in Pennsylvania and several pieces on heritage tourism and community archaeology including a chapter in the 2007 edited work, Archaeology as a Tool of Civic Engagement, by AltaMira Press. Additionally, she has returned to write on the topic of identity with a co-written chapter in Archaeology of Identity and Dissonance: Contexts for a Brave New World (2019) by University of Florida Press. Recent work on decolonizing the Section 106 process was published in Archaeologies (2019), a World Archaeology Congress journal, as well as part of the Berghahn Books edited volume Going Forward by Looking Back: Archaeological Perspectives on Socio-ecological Crisis, Response and Collapse (2020). In addition to these peer-reviewed pieces, she has co-authored an online publication with a member of the United Order of Tents Eastern District #3 as part of a new unfolding community-based project located in Brooklyn. She is currently working on two edited volumes focusing on the intersections of heritage and archaeology with advocacy and activism.
She has served on several boards of directors for various archaeological organizations in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York, and was recently president of Professional Archaeologists of New York City, a not-for-profit organization devoted to the protection and preservation of New York City's archaeological sites. She has always felt service and collaboration are important parts of any position within a chosen career path. The various employment positions she has held permitted her to civically engage collaboratively with the communities where she has worked and lived, for she feels it is important to bridge the gap between scholarship and action in true democratic ways. Last but not least, she is a single mom to an energetically creative daughter, who keeps her constantly on her toes and thinking outside the box.
